We met in my first life where everything was new and unfamiliar. It was your second, you had said, you took my hand and guided my way through the world, nice and thorough. In your first life you didn’t have anyone to tell you what’s right and what’s wrong, no one to turn to for questions of what, why, when, where, who, and how. I crossed my heart and said compared to you, I am a novice, but I will learn everything — every little thing in the world, even more than what you’ve taught me, so that one day you would ask a question and I would answer with something other than I wonder. You laughed and told me that I wouldn’t even remember you, because no one’s ever remembered one another. But how could I tell you I remember even the void of nonexistence before I was sent to the world? What I told you: we will see.
In my second life I found you and you did not remember me. But I was familiar, you had said, you prepared a table for us to sit and laughed together. This time you had questions I could answer, this time you were breaking into pieces that I helped putting back together, this time you were without that wisdom after losing everything which I had previously grown fonder and fonder. I took your hand and promised you wouldn’t be alone through it. And though you had no recollection of me, I decided this was how my lifetimes would go: you in every one of them.
In my third life I was a knight and you were the queen—how terribly funny, I thought, that the world finally put us on our appropriate places, because I would give my all to keep you safe and you belonged on a throne. I loved you in secret most nights and in this life you didn’t remember me again. But I knew that your heart would remember, we had no greater love but one another. One day you were alone and I couldn’t help myself; my love was a balloon constantly filled with helium until it couldn’t hold longer. I told you I love you and you had my neck down on the guillotine. But you remember, right? I asked and you didn’t answer.
You once told me how beautiful it is that I was able to remember everything, that no memories would ever be left behind, but in my sixth life I learned that it was a curse as much as it was a blessing. My star, in this life, you were not born and I wandered the earth listlessly. I carried our memories like heavyweights on my chest. I took them to my grave in excruciating silence.
In my last life I saw you in another’s arms. I called out to you to remind you of the love I’ve persevered, of my heart that you’ve taken away and kept with for the longest time, but you didn’t remember me — or you refused to. You’ve anchored our promises into the deepest sea made out of my lifetimes of waiting and left me on that concrete wailing.
